Top Metrics to Monitor Website Performance

Trying to make a successful marketing strategy without measuring the key metrics to track results is like planning a long trip without a map. If you have a web map, the utility of it is to get visitors. However, the way you retain and convert people into customers depends on how well you can use the right metrics. So, here are the key metrics that you should be using in order to measure the overall performance and health of your business.

1. Traffic

Traffic is the most popular statistic that business owners can track. The main sources of traffic are:

Direct visitors are people who type the URL of your site in the browser and become a visitor of your site;

Search visitors are people who found your site because it appeared in search results;

Referral visitors are people who found your site on another blog or site.

Some people underestimate the importance of one or several of these sources because they have different levels of conversion. However, you should calculate each one individually in order to get correct results.

2. Retention Metrics

Retention metrics can show your ability to hold the attention of your visitors. This is the percentage of visitors who return to your content pieces and your site. It also monitors the frequency of returns and tells you about relationships you have with the audience as well as if they see your site and you as a quality source and a trusted company. According to studies, visitors who visited your site five times in a month were more likely to regularly return to the site.

3. New Visitor Conversion

The way regular visitors interact with your site is not the same with what new visitors do. Therefore, if you want to analyze your new visitors you need to distract returning and loyal customers. This will help you see how to improve the experience of users and reduce the bounce rate for them.

4. Interactions Per Visit

Many companies don’t really care about visitors who don’t convert. However, there is a way to leverage interactions of visitors into conversions (like subscriptions, downloads, purchases). You should know what those people are doing on your website, how you can influence their behavior and make them do what you want. For example, how many comments or feedbacks left, how much time they spend on each page, and what is the page view rate, to name a few. Each interaction they perform is important and your main goal is to increase those interactions and turn visitors into conversions.

5. Value Per Visit

Calculating value per visit is both very simple and very difficult. It’s easy because you only need to divide the number of visits by total value created. However, it’s difficult not only because it’s tied up to the interactions per visit but also because there are many things that are hard to measure involved that create this value per visit.

For example, you can calculate what value cpm advertising creates when each visitor adds a page view to your traffic, but those visitors who leave comments on that page also create an intangible value. Or, let’s say, you have an e-commerce website. Visitors create value every time they buy something from you but they also create value when talking about your website with friends or writing feedbacks.

6. Cost per Conversion

Once again, the cost is the key metric to track. You should know the amount of money you spend on each conversion. The good indication of this metric is the conversion acquisition channels. Let’s say you spent $500 on traffic last month and earned 250 conversions from that traffic, which means each conversion costs you $2. Of course, you want to reduce this number, while maintaining the amount and value of each conversion.

7. Bounce Rate

The bounce refers to a visitor that finds your site, visits one page and leaves (some say that a bounce is a person who stays on your website for less than 30 seconds). Therefore, the bounce rate shows how many people left your website after opening and quickly closing its page.

8. Exit Pages

Your bounce rates are not about your home page only. Many companies have their calls to action or conversion on the second or third page of the process. In order to maximize the conversion rate, you need to know at what stage people often leave your site or abandon their shopping card. Then you can properly optimize the process.

And here you have it – the simple guide to the key metrics. Remember that they all are important for your business. You will never be able to achieve the full potential of your website without using all the metrics. So, it’s time to start tracking!